Blake's Resurgence Reckoned With at NYRB

Jenny Uglow considers Tate Britain's William Blake exhibition in an article published by New York Review of Books. In her assessment, she notes that "Tate curators, Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, argue that Blake the artist has been ignored in recent years in favor of Blake the poet. Yet the two are surely indivisible." Picking up there: 

After he invented his complex process of “relief etching”—its technique still unknown—text and image flow together, each reinterpreting the other. In the prophetic books, with their mix of historical characters and beings from his own mythology, the pages speak as one, visually and verbally. The tiny pages of the Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), Blake’s first attempt to integrate text and image, mounted here so that one can see both sides of each page are almost dreamlike in their intensity.

The Tate show emphasizes particular works, and it is awe-inspiring to see the evolution of the illuminated books from America: A Prophecy (1793) and his “Continental Prophecies” series, to the epic poem Milton (1804–1818) and his last book, Jerusalem (1804–1820). Blake’s radical politics first came to the fore in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), in which Satan is the voice of imagination and desire, and Eternal Delight defies the shackles of Reason. But the illuminated books could never be produced in enough numbers to make a profit, and by 1790 Blake was making his living as an engraver, in particular working for the radical printer Joseph Johnson. The influence of two of Johnson’s authors can be felt in Blake’s poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). One was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Original Stories he illustrated in 1796, and whose anger in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) echoes in the tirade against sexual oppression delivered by Blake’s heroine Oothoon. The second was the denunciation of slavery in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1796), for which Blake was already engraving illustrations. 

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